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- 01 Feb - 07 Feb, 2025
One of the many things that makes Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist so essential is how it defies easy categorisation. It is “about” so many things without specifically hammering, highlighting, or bullet-pointing them. Sure, it’s impossible to miss the commentary on capitalism embedded in the script by Corbet and Mona Fastvold. Still, it’s also a story of immigration, addiction, Zionism, architecture, inequity, class, violence, and even filmmaking. The word ambitious is overused in modern criticism, but the very existence of The Brutalist feels like a miracle. It’s a film that turns inward into itself, winding its themes around its characters like a great American novel.
Adrien Brody is introduced as László Tóth in an essential, tone-setting sequence. At first, it’s hard to tell where he is, surrounded by people in an overcrowded space with the cacophony of conversations around him. His face is bursting with happiness at the site of the Statue of Liberty, but Corbet and cinematographer Lol Crawley warp the moment by presenting the iconic structure upside down, at the top of the frame. The statue shifts to the side, but it’s never upright, a warped symbol of the American dream, an overture of the film’s main theme to follow in the form of an unforgettable image. This prologue also includes a quote from Goethe that feels like the most pronounced Corbet & Fastvold get in how to read what follows: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe themselves free.”
Tóth believes himself free, getting a job at his cousin Attila’s (Alessandro Nivola, always good) furniture shop, notably named Miller & Sons. Like that floating statue, Corbet & Fastvold are seeding themes that will grow later, playing with the artifice of capitalism, a structure that sells the comfort of a family business over actual artistry. When Tóth designs a chair to be put in the front window, Attila’s wife Audrey (Emma Laird) tells him it looks like a tricycle. This is a film that experiments with form while also being narratively about how people exploit artistry and value function over expression.
László’s life changes when Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn) comes to Miller & Sons to hire them to remodel his father Harrison’s library while he’s away from home. The project falls apart when Harrison (Guy Pearce) returns home in a fury, angry that his house is being torn apart by people he’s never met, and refusing to pay. The drama leads to an emotional decision by Attila, who kicks László out of his home, sending him into an addiction spiral with his friend Gordon (Isaach de Bankolé, perfectly understated), until Harrison returns with an apology. He brings László into his world of upper-class snobs, people who display their wealth like it has any meaning, even to a Holocaust survivor, who they see as another object to own. Harrison offers to help László bring his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and their niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) over from Europe, but it’s a prelude to what he really wants: The design of a community centre that will serve as a tribute to Harrison’s recently deceased mother. It’s a place to gather, but also a place that he controls, and one that he claims will look forward but is anchored in the past by being a monument to his mother.
Harrison seeks to control László from the very beginning. He uses rage in that first scene, he literally throws money at him in a key second-half scene (and then asks him to give it back), and the climax of the first pre-intermission half sets their relationship perfectly. After offering legal assistance to make his dreams come true in a manner that will surely tie them together, he then basically forces him to move in by not giving him a ride back that night and forcing him to listen to his ideas the next day. Harrison will eventually cross all lines of physical and moral righteousness, a clear parallel to how capitalism destroys art, taking from it what it wants and needs before disposing of it. Some have criticised the sharp turn that the film takes with Harrison and László, but repeat viewings make it clear how much that kind of brutal ownership is there from the very beginning.
Of course, an American epic like The Brutalist only works if the cast is on the same page as the creator, and the majority of the performers here deliver. Brody and Pearce do arguably the best work of their careers. The Brutalist is a work that incorporates well-known world history into two of the definitive forms of expression of the 20th century in architecture and filmmaking, becoming a commentary on both, capitalism and art. Both are essential to the story of the human experience. Both can be beautiful. Both can be brutal.
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